Eden (21 page)

"They're flying overhead, but I don't see them," muttered the Engineer. The Captain couldn't hear him: the squealing continued and the ground went on spouting, though the spouting came no nearer the ship. The two men watched: nothing changed. The thunder on the horizon merged into a single, protracted, unvarying bass rumble, and now the missiles fell without explosion, almost silently. The earth thrown up by the impacts lay in low mounds, like molehills, surrounding the strikes.

"The binoculars," the Captain shouted into the tunnel.

A moment later he had them in his hand. As he looked, his astonishment grew. At first he thought that the attacking artillery was finding the range, but no, the invisible missiles kept falling in the same way. Sweeping the landscape with his binoculars, he saw spurts in all directions. Some were nearer, some farther, but none closer to the ship than six hundred feet.

"What is it?! They're not atomic, are they?!" came the muffled cries from the tunnel.

"No! Not atomic!" he shouted back, straining his voice. The Engineer put his mouth to the Captain's ear.

"Did you see? They keep missing!"

"I can see!"

"We're surrounded on all sides!"

He nodded yes. The Engineer took the binoculars and looked.

Any minute now it would be sunrise. The pale sky, looking washed, filled with a diluted blue. On the plain nothing moved, except for the spouts of earth, which, like a bizarre, flickering hedge that kept vanishing and then rising from the ground anew, surrounded the small hill where the ship was embedded.

Suddenly the Captain made a decision. He crawled out from behind the embankment and in three leaps reached the crest of the hill. There he dropped flat on the ground and looked in the opposite direction, which he had been unable to do at the tunnel entrance. The scene was the same: a wide crescent of strikes, a quivering, smoking hedge of explosions.

Someone hit the parched ground beside him: it was the Engineer. They lay shoulder to shoulder, watching, now almost unaware of the thunder at the horizon, which came in waves and at times seemed to recede—that was the effect of the morning wind, the air heated by the first rays of the sun.

"Those aren't misses!" shouted the Engineer.

"Then what are they?"

"I don't know. Let's wait…"

"No, let's go!"

They ran down the slope—although the missiles were not falling nearby, the howling and whistling were not pleasant—and jumped into the tunnel, one after the other. They left the robot in the passage and entered the ship, pulling the others in with them. They headed for the library, where it was quiet. Here even the ground tremors were almost imperceptible.

"Now what? Do they want to hold us here? To starve us?" asked the Physicist, when they told what they had seen.

"Who knows? I'd like to have a closer look at one of those missiles," said the Engineer. "If the barrage lets up, it might be a good idea to go out and…"

"The robot can go," the Captain said.

"The robot?" asked the Cyberneticist, almost in a groan.

"Nothing will happen to it, don't worry."

They felt a thud, faint but unmistakable. They looked at one another.

"We've been hit!" cried the Chemist, jumping up.

The Captain ran to the tunnel. Up on the surface, nothing appeared to have changed. The sky still thundered—but on the sunlit sand beneath the stern of the ship lay something black and speckled, like a burst bag of shot. He tried to find the place where the strange missile had hit the hull, but the ceramite bore no marks. Before the men behind him could stop him, the Captain began picking up the fragments and putting them into his empty binoculars case. They were still warm.

The Chemist shouted at him. "You're crazy! That could be radioactive!"

They ran back inside. The fragments were not radioactive; the counter, brought near them, was silent. Curiously, they were not cased in any kind of metal. In the hand they crumbled into glistening grains.

The Physicist examined the grains with a magnifying glass, then quickly took them to a microscope. Peering, he whistled.

"Well? Well?" They literally had to pull him from the eyepiece.

"They're sending us watches…" the Chemist said softly, looking up from the microscope after his turn.

There in the field of vision lay hundreds of tiny cogs, wheels, springs, and spindles. The men put a different sample under the lens and saw the same thing.

"What in the hell is it?" said the Engineer.

The Physicist paced—they were in the library—from one wall to another, his hair ruffled. He stopped and stared at them with a wild look, then continued pacing.

"An extremely complicated mechanism of some kind," mused the Engineer, holding a pile of grains in his hand. "There must be millions, if not billions, of these little gears and wheels here! Let's go up," he said, "and see what's happening."

The attack was still going on. The robot, standing guard in the tunnel, had counted 1,109 hits.

"Let's try the hatch now," said the Chemist when they returned to the ship.

The Cyberneticist was hunched over the microscope, looking at the grains. He did not answer when they spoke to him.

In the engine room, the indicator light for the lock was still on. When the Engineer flicked the switch, the light obediently blinked: the hatch was opening. He closed it immediately and announced, "We can ride Defender out anytime."

"Even with the hatch twelve feet off the ground?" asked the Physicist.

"For Defender that's no problem."

At the moment, however, there was no urgent need to leave, so they returned to the library. The Cyberneticist was still at the microscope.

"Let him be. Maybe he'll come up with something," said the Doctor. "And now … we shouldn't just sit here. I suggest we get back to repairing the ship."

With a sigh they rose from their seats. Indeed, what else was there to do? The five descended to the engine room, where the damage was the greatest. The distributor required hours of painstaking work: each circuit had to be tested twice, first with the current off, then on. Every so often the Captain would go out on top and return, saying nothing. In the control room, which was buried forty-five feet underground, they could feel a slight vibration. Noon passed. Their work would have gone much faster with the help of the robot, but they needed it in the tunnel. By one o'clock it had counted more than eight thousand hits.

Although no one was hungry, they ate lunch, to keep up their strength, as the Doctor said. At twelve past two the vibration stopped. Everyone immediately made for the tunnel. On the surface, a small cloud covered the sun, and the whole plain lay shimmering in the heat. There was still dust in the air, from the explosions, but silence reigned.

"Is it over?" the Physicist asked in a voice that sounded strangely loud: over the last few hours they had grown accustomed to the barrage.

Total hits, according to the robot: 10,604.

About eight hundred feet from the ship, all around it, there was a strip of pulverized soil. In places individual craters ran together to form a ditch.

The Doctor began climbing over the embankment at the mouth of the tunnel.

"Not yet," said the Engineer, holding him back. "Let's wait."

"How long?"

"Half an hour or, better, an hour."

"Delayed charges? But there are no explosives there!"

"We don't know that."

The cloud moved away from the sun. It grew brighter.

The Captain heard the rustling first. "What's that?" he whispered.

The others listened. Yes, they could hear it, too. The sound was like the wind moving through leaves or bushes. But there were no leaves or bushes in sight, only the furrowed ring in the sand. The air was still. But the rustling continued.

"Where is it coming from?"

"There?"

They spoke in whispers. The sound seemed to come from all sides now. Could it be the sand shifting?

"But there's no wind…" the Chemist said.

"It's coming from where the missiles hit…"

"I'll have a look."

"Are you crazy? What if those are timed devices?"

The Chemist paled, drew back. And yet the day was so bright, and everything so quiet… He clenched his fists. This was a hundred times worse than the barrage!

The sun was at its zenith. Shadows of cumulus clouds slowly swept across the plain. The clouds, layered and with flat bases, resembled white islands. There was no movement on the horizon; the land everywhere was empty. Even the gray calyxes, whose indistinct silhouettes before had stood above the distant dunes, were gone! It was only now that the men noticed this.

"Look!" cried the Physicist, pointing. But it didn't matter in which direction they looked. The same thing was happening everywhere.

The cratered ground began to tremble. Something shiny was emerging from it. Each place a missile had fallen, there were sprouts. They rose in even rows, almost like the teeth of a comb.

Someone rushed out from the tunnel and ran toward the curved line of glimmering sprouts. It was the Cyberneticist. Everyone shouted and chased after him.

"I know what they are!" he cried, dropping to his knees before the glassy rows of sprouts.

They were finger-length now, and at the base thick as a fist. The sand swirled gently around each one; something was at work below.

"Mechanical seeds!" the Cyberneticist said. With his hands he tried digging up the nearest sprout, but the sand was too hot.

Someone ran and brought shovels, and then the sand and soil flew, revealing long, segmented, tangled strands of a lustrous material. The material was so hard, it rang like metal against the shovels. When the hole was more than three feet deep, the men tried to pull the strange growth out, but couldn't—it was too tightly connected to its neighbors.

"Blackie!" cried a chorus of voices. The robot approached. "Pull it out!"

Steel pincers closed on a shiny shoot as thick as a man's arm. The robot's torso stiffened, and the men watched as its feet began sinking slowly into the ground. There was a high hum, as of a string stretched to its limit.

"Let go!" commanded the Engineer. Blackie stepped awkwardly out of the ground and stood unmoving.

The sprouts, a hedge now, were almost a foot and a half high. At their base they began filling slowly with a darker, milky blue color.

"So," said the Captain calmly. "It seems they want to fence us in."

No one spoke for a while.

"But isn't this rather primitive? I mean, we can still leave," said the Chemist.

The Captain said, "That scouting party of theirs must have done their job well. Look, it's an almost perfect circle around us."

"Mechanical seeds," said the Cyberneticist. He was calmer now, brushing the sand from his hands. "Inorganic spores sown by artillery."

"But the stuff is not metal," observed the Chemist. "Blackie would have bent it. It must be something like supranite."

"No, it's sand, only sand!" said the Cyberneticist. "Don't you see? This is the product of an inorganic metabolism! Sand is converted catalytically into some macromolecule based on silicon. Those shoots are made of that—just as plants extract salts from the soil."

The Chemist knelt and touched the shiny substance. He looked up. "And what if they had landed on a different kind of soil?" he asked.

"They would have adapted. Of that I'm certain! That's why they're so hellishly complex: designed and programmed to produce the most resistant material possible from what they have at their disposal."

"If it's just silicon, Defender should have no problem getting through it," said the Engineer with a smile.

"I wonder if this was really an attack," the Doctor said thoughtfully. The others looked at him in surprise.

"How would you describe it?"

"Perhaps … an attempt at defense. To isolate us."

"And then? Are we supposed to sit here and wait like worms under a bell jar?"

"Why do you need Defender?"

The question made them hesitate. The Doctor went on: "We're no longer short of water. The ship will be repaired—in all likelihood—in a week, in ten days. The nuclear synthesizers should be functioning in a few hours. I don't see this as a bell jar. A high wall, rather. An impassable barrier for them, and therefore they assume for us as well. With the synthesizers, we'll have food. We require nothing from them, and they could hardly have been clearer in telling us that we're not welcome here…"

They listened, frowning. The Engineer looked and saw that the tips were almost knee-level, and that they were joining, fusing. The rustling was now so loud that it sounded like a hundred beehives. The bluish roots at the base of the wall had swollen almost as thick as tree trunks.

"Could you bring the doubler here?" the Captain asked unexpectedly.

The Doctor looked at him strangely. "Now? Here? For what reason?"

"I don't know. Just bring him. Please."

The Doctor nodded and left. The others stood silent in the sun until he reappeared. With difficulty the naked giant crawled out of the tunnel behind him. It seemed animated, almost satisfied, following the Doctor and gurgling softly. Then its flat little face tensed, its blue eye widened, it wheezed. It turned around and began to wail. It ran toward the shiny wall with great leaps, as though intending to hurl itself at it, but instead, hopping grotesquely, the creature ran along the entire circle, whining and coughing. Then it ran to the Doctor and began plucking at the chest of his suit with its stubby fingers and peering into his eyes. Sweat poured off it. It pushed at the Doctor, jumped back, looked around again, and, drawing its small torso into its trunk with an unpleasant noise, fled into the dark tunnel. They could see the flat, twitching soles of its feet as it crawled inside.

"Were you expecting that?" the Doctor finally asked the Captain.

"No … not really. I just thought that the wall wouldn't be strange to him. I expected a reaction. Some kind of recognition. But nothing like this…"

"It was recognition, all right," the Physicist muttered.

"Yes," said the Doctor. "He's seen this before. Something similar, in any case. And he's petrified by it."